BREAKING NEWS

Too Soon We Shift Blame After Tragedy

Shocking is practically an understatement. A sacred “safe space” in mere seconds turned into a house of horror leaving 26 dead during a Sunday morning worship service. Thankfully, a humble God-fearing NRA-trained man being a good guy with a gun bravely confronted the anti-Christian mass murderer and thwarted further escalation of the killing. While grateful for the heroic action of gun-owning “Good Samaritan” Stephen Willeford, the world is very different from days gone by when church doors in America remained unlocked 24/7. Evil escalates. It’s an uneasy brute fact of life.

Amidst all the horrific carnage strewn on the floor of the sanctuary from a depraved godless man on a deranged rampage to kill, the choice to do that was not God’s, but a human being empowered with making moral choices. In a society divorcing fault from personal actions, blame gets placed on God. It reminds you of Adam shifting the blame on his wife, Eve and, in part, on God who gave her to him. Fallen man tends to transfer culpability.

Following the church massacre, hard, but fair, questions emerge, like “Why didn’t God stop it?”“Isn’t God all-powerful?”“If God is all-powerful, why did he let it happen?”

God is all-powerful. His all-powerful presence partially withdrew when man rejected God. Death, pain, sweat and sorrow indicated the woeful fallout from Adam’s choice to disobey. His stewardship of the pristine creation on earth failed to submit to God opening the Pandora’s Box of evil, unleashing a mega-dosage of devastating consequences in a sin-cursed world. As children of Adam, no one has absolute immunity from even the worst of it. Did Jesus, though perfect and sinless, escape the unjust savagery of sin cursing his body on the cross? Was Jesus proof that God was not all-powerful or was Jesus proof of an all-powerful God by overcoming a sin-cursed world by his resurrection? Outside of Jesus, God being all-powerful is, at best, speculative, but through Christ, God shows where He is indeed all-powerful to those who believe His truth in a world that rejects Him.

God’s all powerful nature is very much present in heaven today with a promise that someday the new creation will exhibit that same all-powerful presence. For now in this life, being partially withdrawn from all-powerful presence of God, it’s impossible to be invulnerable from the evil of this world, but through Christ, the hope of salvation surely prevails in spite of it.